Sudden Clarity Harry

Don't get me wrong- everyone should read new books. There's so many incredible pieces of fiction in the world, and I'll recommend my favorites day and night.

But Percy Jackson and Discworld and Earthsea and Broken Earth and Singing Hills and Murderbot and Teixcalaan and Wayfarers simply will not make you feel the way Harry Potter made you feel when you were 13.

Because you aren't 13 any more.

You will not find the Fandom community that wraps around you and helps mold you into the person you will become like Harry Potter did when you were 13.

Because you aren't 13 any more, and you never will be again.

And it sucks that Harry Potter is irreparably tainted. It sucks that all the things Harry Potter meant to you has been taken from you, and you cannot get them back. It sucks. Be angry about it. Be sad. Be disappointed and betrayed.

And, honestly if you really go back to HP, you'll find it isn't actually all that good. Youll find that it carries a lot of assumed bias and mean spirited callousness and British classism. Plot holes and lazy status quo reinforcement and haphazard world building.

Not even Harry Potter NOW can be to you what Harry Potter was to you THEN.

And if you spend the rest of your life reading new books because you want to find the book that will be what Harry Potter was to you when you were 13, you will spend your life being disappointed.

So.

Read new books. Read new books to find new experiences, new thoughts, new feelings. You won't find a replacement. You won't find a book to be what Harry Potter used to be to you.

But you could find Discworld, and Murderbot, and Singing Hills, and Wayfarers , and Broken Earth, and Teixcalaan, and Earthsea *right now.*

I saw people talking about this in the morning. I literally spent all day assuming it was the Onion or something similar.

She's literally caused such bulllshit for transmascs here in terms of transition. First, her money donations and fearmongering led to puberty blockers being stopped for 2 years for trans kids (after a court case involving a transmasc minor, who argued they had Gillick competence. JK and others campaigned against this case, which if it went in favour of transphobes- would have removed Gillick competence for *everyone*. Gillick competence is the reasoning vital to young teens who are pregnant and may seek an abortion etc.).

It was because of the pandemic mainly, but in 2020 we lost all of the transmasc bottom surgeons in the UK. They were drafted to help covid. When it came time to finding replacements, JK and terf groups kicked up such a fuss and culture war about "young (afab) teens 'mutilating' themselves" that the process was unnecessarily lengthened and so many trans men were left in limbo with half finished neophalluses in multi-stage phalloplasty.

for anyone who doesnt remember, the goblins were the banker characters who worked in gringotts and looked Uncomfortably Like jewish stereotypes. and youre suppose to suppress their rebellion, where theyre rebelling against the fact that like most nonhuman magical creatures, theyre treated like shit by wizards. yep :)

click thru the top tweet to read the whole thread with all the screenshots, it just gets worse and worse but jesus fucking christ, HOW. i know i shouldnt be surprised that this fucking francise of all of them is pulling this shit but how fucking blatant can you be.

like yes it has problematic themes but i wish we would stop pretending it always sucked and everyone who liked it was a dumb idiot. yes it’s not Literature (TM), it’s a children series, ok nu. but it was a really good children’s series and there were reasons everyone loved it.

a lot of us have lost an important part of our childhood because it’s tainted now and like. maybe we could or should just be sad about that and recognize we lost something.

on top of that the worldbuilding is genuinely immersive. it really felt to me like there was a world beyond the main characters and that’s something i rarely find in other books.

and yeah as an adult i can look at the goblins and rita skeeter and see how it’s all problematic but as a kid it all truly flew over my head. the goblins didn’t give me internalized antisemitism cause i did not realize they were pulling from jewish stereotypes. rita skeeter did not make me transphobic cause i straight up did not notice the parts about her physical body being “manly” until people pointed that out two years ago.

yeah as an adult i can read it and see a whole boatload of problematic stuff but it wasn’t actually always obvious and like. it could have gone differently. if jkr was a different person she could have apologized for all of this. or explained she hadn’t known better but now she does and that she’s sorry to the communities she hurt. there was a moment when i thought that was possible. now it’s obvious that it’s not, and i think i’m allowed to mourn that.

There was a moment when I realized that despite having been friends with and then dating my ex for nearly a decade, I didn't actually know her at all. It's not that the person I'd been interacting with didn't exist, or that she carefully acted nice to my face for ten years while cackling in her lair when I wasn't present. All of the happy moments and things I'd experienced with her and our love for each other were real. It just wasn't all of her. There was a part of her that was manipulative and volatile, and I only experienced it when we were completely alone. I'd just never spent enough time with her to really see how she was all of the time, or maybe she wasn't always like this but she'd changed so slowly that I didn't notice until it was directed at me.

If I had stayed with her, it would have gotten worse and worse and harder and harder to leave. I got out waaaay before it got even remotely that bad. But I still fucking cried uncontrollably for about an hour in a Walmart parking lot after I broke up with her, and there are times even now when I really miss her and our relationship and wish I could get back together with her.

That's not a unique experience. The children of abusive parents often still love their parents. My clients keep going back to their abusive exes because they love them. They're not wrong when they say "but he wasn't like that all the time." By acknowledging that there was abuse, you're also casting a shadow on all the things you liked about them. It's really hard to reconcile love and pain coming from the same source, and it hurts to lose the love even when you're also losing the pain.

Appropriating Indigenous American cultures for her American wizard school. Making all of the bankers in her books hook-nosed goblins. Naming the ONLY East Asian character in the books "Cho Chang" and putting her in the "smart people house". The way that she treats the Patil Twins, the only two other Asians, and the only South Asians in the series. The way that she treats ALL her characters of color. JKR's racism has always been there. People just seem to gloss over it for some reason and to be honest, I'm getting really frustrated and tired of constantly adding that racism is a problem in the notes of these posts. And this is literally just based on Harry Potter! The rest of her stuff surely has even more problems!

I don't want to downplay her transphobia. That's a huge issue that, I, especially as a trans person, cannot emphasize enough! But as a person of color, I feel like I need to remind y'all that it's just the tip of the iceberg.

I think OP of this post I rbed about JKR's racism specifically against Indigenous Americans put it perfectly. This has made it painfully obvious that people are white before they are queer.

It's not that hard just to acknowledge her racism alongside her transphobia. If you're making a post about her remember that she's shitty in so many other ways, and she's always been shitty.

I know this is long but I'm rambling, so...

tl;dr JKR is racist as well as transphobic. Just acknowledge that in your pleas for people to stop supporting her. Please. It's literally so easy. anyways jkr's a piece of shit and I hope she burns in hell!!

-the japanese school is in iwo jima (wow), they have color-coded robes like karate belts, the name of the school is grammatically incorrect with her "canon" pronunciation butchering the words

-the african school is in Uganda but it's named after the capital of Burkina Faso and on her maps it's located in the Congo and when you're invited to the school, you get a rock sent to you

-african wizards dont have wands they just point at things and all of them can naturally turn into animals (YIKES)

-the brazilian school is hidden in the amazon rainforest and disguised as "a ruined stone temple" despite the fact that no masonry historically occurred in the rainforest, making a stone temple an absolutely obtrusive and terrible disguise

The Wizarding school North America (Ivermory) is riddled with blatant appropriation of Native American cultures, but no one gave a shit.

But no one gave a shit until she started starting transphobic rhetoric.

She literally takes Native American beliefs and... I don't know what the words are for this bullshit. Misrepresents them to capitalize on them? Appropriates them? Completely ignores the original beliefs in order to make up her own?

Although the new insights into the universe of Harry Potter were welcomed by many, the author was strongly criticised online by a number of voices from Native American communities, particularly over her writing about skinwalkers, which in Navajo legend are said to be evil witches or wizards who can take on the form of animals.

Rowling writes that the myth “has its basis in fact … A legend grew up around the Native American Animagi, that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.”

Responding to a question on Twitter, Rowling said that “in my wizarding world, there were no skinwalkers”, with the legend created by those without magic “to demonise wizards”.

But yeah. The transphobia is why we're boycotting her.

(This isn't to say the transphobia is okay or to minimize trans issues. This is to point out that white people only care about issues that effect other white people.)

Look. All I'm saying is if you're going to make a post about why we don't like JK Rowling. Say "we aren't going to support JK Rowling because of her racism and transphobia."

Not to mention. How shitty of a writer must you be if you can't create b your own myths and legends? The fact that she's gotta steal from others completely exemplifies how shitty of an author she is.

Yeah it's really just a dead end discussion. And like, I'm not gonna coddle people and be like "you're valid for liking Harry Potter uwu" I just honestly couldn't care less, I don't see what value we can extract from that conversation.